Unfortunately, I don’t yet know how to post links.

This is why I never, even in jest, use the term “pro-life” to describe people who are anti-choice. In spite of the fact that many profess to believe in a life everlasting which will ultimately render my death on this earth irrelevant when taken in an eternal context, I know what they really are, and it isn’t “pro-life.”

So if women have control over their own bodies, they have more power than the sperm god. Which is sheer blasphemy in boy world because power is very important in boy world. In fact, it is power that the boys eroticize, sexualize and hold sacred, not women. Women are nothing more than vehicles with which to achieve that.

Women’s bodies are, to put it mildly, very hostile to sperm. An average of 400,000,000 sperm are released with each male ejaculation. Over the course of a lifetime, the amount of sperm women’s bodies fight off and kill — even without any aid or help — becomes mind boggling. Especially when one considers how very few sperm, if any at all, reach the holy grail. Kinda makes the male warrior hero look like a joke. I mean, could you imagine a male warrior single-handedly taking on 400,000,000 enemy troops? On the average, 3 times a week?! Little wonder this might upset the boys. And why they might consider it a feat and downright sacred and holy when one of their little sperm soldiers actually does reach the holy grail. He’s all ready to celebrate and do an endzone dance and brag to his friends that it only took 39,116.666,667 sperm troops, reinforced every year, to finally conquer one woman. When all of a sudden a woman says, “Just hold on there, bucko, it ain’t over ’til the fat pregnant lady sings, ” and snatches victory right out of his hands and turns it into defeat. By simply choosing to exericse one of reproduction choices. And by doing so, proves once again that it is not males who are dominant and powerful. And gives him a negative god complex. (Not to say that there’s any positive ones).

I understand this, Twisty, and I appreciate your verbal artistry. And yes, this “epithet” is apt since these people do in fact espouse and proselytize what amounts to a concept of life-sentencing for women and the children they’d like to force us all to have and raise even if it means increased suffering for everybody. Unfortunately, though, the greater anti-choice movement does not dine at even your average intellectual buffet. Irony and sarcasm of this sort tend to be too subtle for them. Instead what happens is that when they hear themselves described by us as “pro-life,” it reaffirms to them their own mythology about themselves.

Although with a few exceptions wit is not in the average godbag’s lunchbox, chicanery and a certain amount of political savvy are nowadays. I do not often see anti-choicers calling us the “pro-choice” movement, preferring instead to call us “pro-abortion” and to reduce doctors who perform a whole range of women’s health services, including abortion where appropriate, to simply “abortionists.” Now, while some among us pro-choicers may be for abortions — yippee! let’s all go out and get one! — as you are well aware, most of us are really for the concept that women have sovereignty over their own bodies and are in fact competent to decide whether to use birth control, give birth, give birth to a baby every year, have our tubes tied, dance to the rhythm method, or even terminate a pregnancy whenever we deem it appropriate to do so, that these are all choices we are empowered to make, that the right to make these choices is a fundamental civil right, and that we do not have to justify these choices to anyone, ever. (Some religious pro-choicers — and they do exist — even say our right to make this choice comes from God, who is the one who gave us women the wombs in the first place, but I digress.)

Since the anti-choicers will not grant us the courtesy of labeling us accurately, I strongly feel the least we can do is always make a point of labeling them accurately. To me this means that sometimes we must sacrifice tasty little morsels of sarcasm — so tart and bitter, and fine with a crisp, sweet citronette — for the greater rhetorical good.

But that’s just my perspective, of course. Since cancer did once force me to choose my life over that of an unexpected fetus, even though several people who actually loved me told me I shouldn’t ’cause it hurt their religious sensibilities, it’s something I tend to take fairly seriously.

Thanks for at least thinking about it. Blame on.

I’m planning to keep my name after marriage. Holy crap! I guess it never occurred to me that anyone would be so steeped in the patriarchy (yes, I know, I still can’t believe how bad it can be) as to find it impossible that your decisions regarding your surname must always be a reflection of some male. No one’s said anything quite so asinine to me yet. I’ve been asked, but I just tell them I’m old and cranky, and have far too many documents in my current name (professional license, master’s degree listing on GeoRef, etc.), and am far too lazy and cheap to go around getting a ton of documents changed. Plus, I’m not that fond of my fiance’s last name. No one seems to question my decision after that. At least, not to my face.

Don’t you know that misery loves company?